Ashwin Padaki
apadaki (at) seas.upenn.edu
I am a first-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am lucky to be advised by Sanjeev Khanna and Erik Waingarten. My work is in theoretical computer science, and I'm broadly interested in the design of sublinear algorithms for processing massive, high-dimensional data.
Before Penn, I studied Math and Computer Science at Columbia University. I was fortunate to have amazing mentors in Josh Alman, Karthik C. S., and Rocco Servedio.
My research is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Preprints
- Sparse Navigable Graphs for Nearest Neighbor Search: Algorithms and Hardness
with Sanjeev Khanna, Erik Waingarten
Publications
- A Polynomial Space Lower Bound for Diameter Estimation in Dynamic Streams
with Sanjeev Khanna, Krish Singal, Erik Waingarten
FOCS 2025 - Inapproximability of Maximum Diameter Clustering for Few Clusters
with Karthik C. S., Henry Fleischmann, Kyrylo Karlov, Styopa Zharkov
SODA 2025 - Smaller Low-Depth Circuits for Kronecker Powers
with Josh Alman, Yunfeng Guan
SODA 2023
Other
- Years ago, I interned as a quantitative trader at Optiver, an options market-making firm in Chicago.
- Outside of research, I like playing soccer and tennis, going on long walks and hikes, making music, and experimenting with wordplay.